Stereolab - The Laboratory of Acid Melodies

Austere and light at the same time, Stereolab were a pivotal experience of the entire Nineties decade. The credit isn't due only to the originality that always set them apart, but also to the courage they showed in managing to smuggle an entire world of sounds in front of an audience that had generally always snubbed them, if not outright despised them in toto. With the audacity of the most fearless avant-gardists, the Anglo-French outfit managed to pull off an operation that looked reckless on paper: marrying an inclination for art-rock borrowed from bands like Velvet Underground and Suicide, an obsessive kraut-rock-style rhythm and a love for proto-electronics (early experiments with Moogs, vintage keyboards) with the forbidden pleasure of the catchiest, most accessible pop melodies. The result was a kind of new wave of indie-rock, one that managed to instill into that microcosm sounds considered taboo for decades (from Sixties French chanson to easy listening and vintage film scores), while at the same time helping to forge a cutting-edge formula that, thanks to its ability to deconstruct rock's traditional forms, earned the group comparisons with illustrious bands such as Roxy Music, King Crimson and Pink Floyd, as well as countless attempts at imitation (Broadcast, Pram and Laika being the most inspired).

The virtual birth of Stereolab can be dated to March 1988, when the twenty-year-old French backing singer Laetitia "Seaya" Sadier and the twenty-four-year-old Tim Gane met in Paris, at a gig by the "Marxist" McCarthy, in which Tim played.

The two - who would soon become a couple in private life too - were musical opposites: Laetitia was passionate about pop, easy listening, bossa nova and vintage film scores, while Tim was a devotee of kraut-rock, minimalism and art rock. But, looking closely, their tastes would become precisely the coordinates within which Stereolab's journey would unfold. And so Gane decided to shelve McCarthy and found a new band with Sadier, one that proved perfect right from its name, Stereolab, inspired by a division of Vanguard Records that showcased hi-fi sound effects.

They're aided by Joe Dilworth and Martin Kean; the two will later be joined by Gina Morris (vocals), soon replaced by Australian Mary Hansen, whose vocal call-and-response with Sadier would become a trademark of the band, as well as by Duncan Brown (bass) and Andy Ramsay (drums), while the role of sixth member, on keyboards, would be subject to a revolving door of changes (Mick Conroy, Sean O'Hagan, Katharine Gifford and finally Morgan Lhote).

Tim and Laetitia's first move is to set up their own label, Duophonic, which in 1991 releases their debut EP Super 45, on a 10-inch vinyl pressed in just 800 copies. Three more would follow, collected together with the first on the singles compilation Switched On, a tribute to "Switched-On Bach" and similar titles that in the 60s and 70s put the Moog front and centre. This electronic retro-futurism forcefully enters the Stereolab formula, infiltrating the raga of "Brittle", the carefree harmonies of "Doubt", the exotic sinuousness of "Au Grand Jour" and the post-psychedelic jam of "The Light That Will Cease To Fail", where their signature guitar vertigo already stands out, combined with the hypnotic cadences of the drumming, acidic organ lines and call-and-response vocal interplay.

The peak of these first, somewhat raw and naive experiments is, in all likelihood, the mesmerizing chant of "Super Electric", launched by Sadier over a scorching bed of boogie guitars and propelled by an inexorable motorik pulse in the style of Neu!.

After signing to Too Pure (alongside PJ Harvey and Th' Faith Healers, Stereolab would form the spearhead of the young label's roster), it's finally time for the debut album, Peng!, released in 1992. A somewhat rough but already astonishing work, it manages to combine immediacy and experimentation, blending echoes of Velvet Underground and Suicide, pop hooks and synthetic electronics in the vein of Kraftwerk, with highlights like the ethereal "Super Falling Star", the Suicide-esque pantomime of "The Seeming And The Meaning" and the krautrock-inflected "Orgiastic" and "Mellotron".

Laetitia Sadier's voice does the rest, with an innate chanteuse charm and a bewitching delivery that draws on the fabled vocalist repertoire of the 60s, such as Françoise Hardy and Sandie Shaw.

While Low-fi indulges Gane's passion for lo-fi sounds in the style of Pavement, the mini-album Space Age Batchelor Pad Music continues the progression toward a more austere sound, culminating in the vehement space boogie of "We're Not Adult Orientated", almost a manifesto of their youthful, uncompromising philosophy.

The peak of this phase of their career is the single "Jenny Ondioline", a long acid-drenched delirium that establishes them among the great experimentalists of the era. Their sound is dominated by keyboards, from which pulsing, repetitive sounds emerge that recall the minimalism of artists like Reich, Glass, Mertens or Nyman. "I love the sound of early Philip Glass and Steve Reich - Gane reveals - But also the Canterbury scene. My favourite band was Soft Machine. Another decisive influence was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, for their use of the horn section and those quirky references to brass-band music".

Another crucial insight of Stereolab is their reworking of the kraut-rock of Neu!, Can, Faust and company. "That kind of music is extraordinary - Gane continues - Some think it's heavy and alienating, but it isn't, and if I were asked to bring just one record to a desert island, it would probably be an album of German music from that period. I find it very exciting, it widened the scope of expressive possibilities thanks to clear avant-garde drives, which still feel current today".

By 1993, the Anglo-French band has already reached peak synergy, as shown by the first of their masterpieces, the album Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements. Housed in a sleeve that reworks, in a postmodern key, the test pressings used for early stereo hi-fi systems, the record represents in every sense the manifesto of the Stereolab aesthetic. The use of Moog, samples, easy-listening music and hi-fi test recordings, fused with their "glide guitar", forms a perfect cocktail, to which Sadier's sensual voice adds itself with absolute naturalness.

The ten tracks flow smoothly, with no dead spots. The opening "Tone Burst" is a ride driven by frenetic rhythms, with Sadier's faint narrating voice paraphrasing the most atmospheric Nico while Gane stretches the notes of his guitar toward infinity. Mechanical drones combine in "Our Trinitone Blast" with Sadier's emphatic declamation, setting up a guitar apotheosis worthy of the best Sonic Youth. After the explosive start, the sound softens into the sensual coils of "Pack Yr Romantic Mind", an easy-listening digression that transports the listener into the bohemian atmosphere of a 1950s Parisian café. And while "I'm Going Out Of My Way" vibrates with a subtle, deliciously pop energy, the seven minutes of "Golden Ball" shift gears with a spectacular crescendo, built on a dragging rhythm and lattices of filtered voices that flow into Sadier's evocative singing.

But in the Stereolab mix there's also room for quiet, experimental pieces like the spectral "Pause", where distorted whispers almost serve as the rhythm, around which the keyboards and the delicate harmonies of Sadier and Hansen float. It's the prelude to the long acid delirium of the single "Jenny Ondioline", a free reworking of Neu!'s "Hallogallo": 18 minutes of improvisation, where sampled voices, solemn keyboards, pauses, noises, guitar orgies and synthetic rhythms follow one another in no particular order. It's a distillation of the Stereolab sound and its "historic" coordinates: space-rock, minimalism, Canterbury-style improvisation, Suicide-esque psychotic electronics, morbid Velvet-style ballads. Everything converges into a jam full of twists, a sort of postmodern mantra that detonates into a chaotic finale, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray".

After this tour de force, one might expect a pause. Instead, "Analogue Rock" starts right back up with another incredible array of sounds: relentless percussion, spectral organ, guitar chords stretched to the point of spasm, hypnotic keyboards, sumptuous vocalizing. The band's tendency toward improvisation finds an ideal vehicle in the acid nursery rhyme of "Crest" (with vaguely Doors-like keyboards), while "Lock-Groove Lullaby" closes the album with that same persuasive sensuality that had marked its beginning.

The album's "announcements" are essentially two: Stereolab are already a mature band, and their sound is by far among the most innovative heard in the '90s.

Reinforcing these certainties around the Anglo-French outfit, a year later comes the excellent Mars Audiac Quintet (1994), yet another enigmatic title. "It's not a reference to the planet - Sadier explains - It's just an amplifier that Tim bought. And an 'audiac' is a piece of 60s dentist's equipment. It's a headset where you hear the same frequency that the drill is producing in your tooth, so with the sound travelling through your ear instead of your teeth, everything is more bearable".

Suspended between nostalgia for the past and excitement for the future, Stereolab carve out new gems of precious retro-futurism: the irresistible melody of "Ping Pong", with a delightful refrain wrapped in synth arabesques, the nursery-rhyme cadence of "Three Longers Later", with Sadier's carefree la-la-la leading into a stormy, Sonic Youth-like climax driven by surging drumming, the other melodic gem "Wow And Flutter", set within yet another hammering groove, the minimalist organ of "Anamorphose", and the ethereal warbling of "Transona Five", which inevitably draws the listener into a trance.

But what also gives substance to a near-perfect album is the retro electronics of "Des Étoiles Électroniques", the drone underpinning the 1950s-style vocalizing of "Three Dee Melodie", the convoluted easy listening of "International Colouring Contest", the plunge into feverish psychedelia of "Nihilist Assault Group" (a seven-minute tour de force with an acid coda), the exotica digression of the instrumental "Fiery Yellow" and the near-noise feedback explosion of "Outer Accelerator".

It's a triumph of timbres, rhythms and vintage keyboards (Moog, Farfisa and Vox), shadowed by new avant-garde euphorias, also hidden within the riddles of the lyrics. And at times the contrast between the rigor of the themes and Sadier's ye-ye timbre is truly disorienting. Stereolab confirm themselves as masters at handling and assembling contrasts. Everything flows smoothly in their mutant scores. And the evocative power of these tracks isn't so far removed from that of the most mesmerizing nursery-rhyme melodies penned by Cocteau Twins.

The marriage of austere scores, guitar energy and easy listening also returns on the following Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996), their melodic masterpiece (which is precisely why it was poorly digested by the more intransigent and bigoted wing of the critics).

The record is in fact an almost definitive essay in their avant-garde pop art, able to drift with the utmost ease from the cold, mechanical minimalism of "Metronomic Underground" to the irresistible futurist-funk refrain of "Percolator" (one of their catchiest tracks ever), from the icy pulsations of "Olv 26" to the spirited stride of the title track, forged by another vocal wonder from Sadier-Hansen over a bed of bubbling synths, while the throbbing bass of the music-box-like "Anonymous Collective" and the gloomy cadence of "Monstre Sacre" (yet another homage to their masters Velvet Underground) seal the darkest and most unsettling episodes.

The album effectively marks the peak of their catchiest, most appealing sound - almost danceable at times - with high-impact tracks that finally reach the ears of a non-indie audience too. It would indeed become their biggest commercial success, to the point that, when they announced they were halting their activity, Stereolab explained on their website that, "having reached no. 51 on Amazon's list of the best indie-rock albums of all time" with Emperor Tomato Ketchup, they realized that "their mission, for the time being, could be considered accomplished".

But their experimental streak keeps pace with their (oblique?) pop strategies, also taking shape in Music Or The Amorphous Body Study Centre, a soundtrack for an exhibition by sculptor Charles Long.

By the end of the Nineties, Stereolab had become a cult band on the alternative scene, with their only seemingly naive look and the bare, simple design of their records. A studied listlessness, also reflected in Laetitia Sadier's breezy voice, creating a jarring contrast with the commitment of the lyrics, often politicized and built from a few phrases, like brushstrokes in an expressionist painting.

Prolific like few others, Stereolab returned with Dots And Loops (1997), veering towards a softer, cocktail-lounge sound, far from the electric, deviant pop of the previous record. Produced by John McEntire of Tortoise, the album explores the most minimalist pop ("Brakhage"), with scraps of acoustic drum'n'bass ("Parsec") and hip-hop ("Ticker-Tape Of The Unconscious"), subdued funky touches and polyphonic choruses ("The Flower Called Nowhere"), alongside their trademark jingle-soundtrack atmospheres ("Miss Modular").

The endless "Refractions In The Plastic Pulse" (seventeen and a half minutes) tries to serve as a summa of the whole operation, attempting a not-always-successful blend of drum'n'bass, deviant electronics, dub and instrumental stretches, while the other tour de force, "Contronatura" (nine minutes), closes the album with a sophisticated yet hazy ambient-glitch-chill-out, with Sadier's voice failing to bite as sharply as usual.

So this time there are, indeed, a few missteps. Their great virtue - the ability to blend disparate genres - also becomes their limitation, because once the magic formula is discovered, the operation repeats itself with a certain monotony, and every new track carries with it the ghosts of those that came before.

After the release of Alluminium Tunes, a collection of rare and unreleased material, the following Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night intensifies their exploration of easy listening, revisited through a postmodern lens. It's fifteen tracks made up of catchy rhythmic and melodic particles, repeated with endless variations, piling up "different elements that can add depth to the tracks in terms of emotion while also guaranteeing a constant surprise effect", as Laetitia Sadier and co. explain. The result is a soundtrack for a film that's fun, visionary and kitsch, holding together American post-rock and Brazilian pop. It's enjoyable in its best moments - the opening "Fuses", which mixes tribal drums, jazzy horns and retro languor, the techno-samba with new vocal counterpoints of "Caleidoscopic Gaze", the new South American digressions for piano and keyboards of "Puncture In The Radax Permutation" - but the record ends up boring in other spots, where it seems to want to bask in an intellectualized (and perhaps itself bored) reshuffling of all the styles the band has explored before (the merry-go-round of "Op Hop Detonation", the refined minimalism of "Blue Milk", the Dadaist pastiche of "Italian Shoes Continuum"). And the record's exhausting overall length (75 minutes) certainly doesn't help ease this dangerous tendency towards tedium that starts to surface in their work.

Ironically, having turned retro memorabilia into a thoroughly modern sonic category, Stereolab risk becoming retro memorabilia themselves.

Things don't fare much better with the six tracks of the mini-album The First Of The Microbe Hunters (2000), a rather inconclusive project, in which really only the collaboration with High Llamas on the lengthy "Outer Bongolia" stands out, bringing their sound back onto respectably Latin-tinged paths.

Celebrating a decade of music, Stereolab instead rediscover glimpses of their best form with Sound-Dust (2001), an album less repetitive than its predecessors and overall darker and more decadent, helped also by the contribution of a sound wizard like Jim O'Rourke, at the mixing desk alongside McEntire. "For this anniversary we treated ourselves to another exploration," Gane recounts. "We wanted to try all kinds of sounds, to be more sophisticated. The instinct of the moment led us towards melodic, soft, impressionistic music."

The new atmosphere is felt right from the tense instrumental overture of "Black Ants In Sound Dust". Sadier's beguiling singsong resurfaces starting with the second track, "Spacemoth", with a kind of funeral march led by the sound of trumpets and a faint melody, propped up by obsessive percussion and stylistic variations in pure minimalist technique. "Captain Easychord" winds around a piano sonata, O'Rourke's slide guitar and celestial choruses with vocal interweavings reminiscent of Enya. The rhythm tightens on "The Black Arts", carried by a dance beat and a colourful bed of keyboards, as it does too in the second half of "Double Rocker".

There's also a resurgence of recycled lounge and Sixties pop themes, in tracks like "Baby Lulu" and "Hallucinex", while the experiment of "Suggestion Diabolique" tries to blend minimalism, funk and jazz over almost 8 minutes into a pastiche of undeniable elegance, setting up the grand finale of "Les Bon Bons des Raisons", a kind of overall summa of this new style, as sinuous and velvety as it is severe and calibrated in its arrangements.

In December 2002, however, the band's story was marked by tragedy: Australian singer and guitarist Mary Hansen died in London after being struck by a truck while riding her bicycle.

For Stereolab it's an extremely difficult moment, and Margerine Eclipse (2004) reflects the disorientation that followed Hansen's death: with Sadier now providing her own counter-vocals, she comes across like a chanteuse lost in a hall of mirrors. The real evolution, then, happens on the sonic side. With McEntire no longer producing, the band's sound sheds some of the more convoluted free-jazz-inflected elucubrations, as the Ep Instant 0 In The Universe, released in 2003, had already shown. But the underlying idea remains the same: back come the inevitable synth burbles, the relaxed tempos, the futurist bossa-nova beats and the endless "ba-da-ba" choruses.

It opens with Farfisa trills and almost danceable rhythms, before Sadier takes the stage, armed with her unmistakable French sing-song delivery: "Vonal Declosion" is a fruit salad of soul, psychedelia and funk, blended at the speed of light. "Need To Be" is dominated by a Sadier as mannered (yet seductive) as ever, over a patchwork of synthesizers, organs and tart guitars. A well-oiled machine, but one that's spinning its wheels. "...Sudden Stars" shows a bit more verve, while "Cosmic Country Noir", propelled by a robotic drum machine straight out of the Kraftwerk playbook, veers into futurist synth-funk.

Sadier remains a terrific entertainer, as when she welcomes us into the cocktail lounge of "La Demeuere". What's missing, though, are the melodic gusts of their best records, and even when the band plunges into sonic storms like "Margerine Rock", you always suspect you're listening to Stereolab as played by a diligent cover band.

If there's any flash of innovation, it comes instead from the band's more melancholy side, the one capable of sketching the crooked waltz of "The Man With 100 Cells", the synthetic bossa-nova groove of "Margerine Melodie" or the hushed progressions of "10 Feel and Triple", dedicated to Hansen. The electro-blues of "Bop Scotch" is a refined but merely calligraphic exercise, while the nostalgic "Dear Marge" is a mambo sent galloping into an orgy of disco-funk beats à la Earth Wind & Fire. Even Sadier's barricade-storming slogans ("People oppressed, liberties crushed") now reek of mannerism. Amid neon fluorescence, organs d'antan, flabby atmospheres and a riot of submerged voices and melodies, the record struggles to its end. Their early Marxist pop was out of step with History. Their current pop is now out of step even with the contemporary bands that owe them a debt.

Dropped by Elektra due to lower-than-expected sales, Stereolab return to the label that launched them, Too Pure. To celebrate the (happy?) occasion, their first release is a box set of three CDs and a DVD, Oscillons From The Anti-Sun (2005), which collects all the tracks from nine singles, or rather Eps, if you go by the hazy distinction the band makes on its website. These are all the tracks drawn from the LPs released between 1993 and 2001, as well as "Fluorescences", the only single in this compilation not to have originated from an album.

A year later came the return to the studio for Fab Four Suture (2006), simultaneously a new Stereolab album and a singles collection. The twelve tracks that make it up are those from the old-style singles (vinyl only, one song per side) that the band released in two batches. Esquivel, Sixties pop, kraut, post-rock and everything else continue to coexist amiably, even within the same track. So perhaps it isn't really the quality of the music that's faltering, even if a comparison with their output of ten years earlier would be unflattering. The class is still there, and Stereolab could never truly fail. What's irritating, what makes the record a heavy listen, is the emergence of a strong sense of fatigue, of craft for craft's sake.

The songs are presented in circular fashion, with the (almost) instrumental twins "Kyberneticka Babicka" opening and closing the record. Sadier discreetly accompanies both pieces in that avant-retro style of which Stereolab have already given countless examples, and, to be honest, more striking ones than these two. But what's true of the album's opening and closing applies, unfortunately, to the whole thing. Nothing bad, but truly nothing memorable. Yes, the horns on "Eye Of The Volcano" aren't bad, nor is its little coda, but we're still in the same territory. And the lyrics, too, are exactly the same as ever: the utopia is starting to feel a bit worn out, and after fifteen years the naif aura struggles to remain convincing. The same goes for the nursery-rhyme of "Plastic Mile", the kraut-tinged tail of "Lo Boob Oscillator" in "Excursions Into 'Oh, A-Oh'", and so on.

It goes on like this for the whole album, neither disliked nor admired. A bit thin, if the cover says Stereolab.

(All too) imposing, Chemical Chords (2008) still offers glimpses of the class the band has always lavished on minimal compositions for vintage keyboards and pop nursery rhymes built around two-note melodies, which, amid childlike la-la-las, used to express a vision of the world steeped in apocalyptic, anarchic retro-futurism. It's no coincidence that the record opens precisely with the band's unchanging "not adult oriented" doctrine, stringing together first a liquid, seemingly carefree pop ditty ("there is nothing to be sad about", repeats the opening "Neon Beanbag") and then Sadier's ever-fascinating French vocals, which on "Three Women" come wrapped in an instrumental setup reminiscent of the period of collaborations with John McEntire.

Indeed, the whole album invites multiple comparisons with the band's past, alternating reassuring minimal symphonies, circular little songs, interstellar drifts, hints of jazz-lounge and harmonic decompositions built from cuts and blips.

The pity is that, in the meantime, the spirit has changed, to the point that the same sonic solutions, once the fruit of brilliant intuitions, now sometimes come across as saccharine and stale. So, after a promising start, the album only offers the odd flash here and there, scattering across its length a freshness that it's still nice to find in tracks like "Valley Hi!", "Pop Molecule [Molecular Pop 1]" and "Fractal Dream Of A Thing".

With a period of inactivity announced (one that, even after Laetitia Sadier's solo album, seems to point rather toward a definitive breakup), in 2010 the band bowed out with a deliberately "minor" release, namely a simple collection of outtakes drawn from the same sessions as Chemical Chords.

In Not Music (2010), then, there are no substantial differences from the previous record: aside from two reworkings of tracks already released in that context ("Silver Sands", in a mix stretched out to ten minutes between kraut keyboards and danceable synths, and "Neon Beanbag", steeped in an acidic treatment courtesy of Bradford Cox), the record in fact offers the same seesaw between lounge music peppered with horns, weary rehashes of a liquid playfulness too short of breath, and the odd well-placed melodic flash ("Supah Jaianto", "Aelita").

Otherwise, the album offers nothing but the usual choral refrains, the usual retro-futurist openings and more rehashed attempts to broaden the band's original formula – through horns, rhythmic segmentations or bolder analogue excursions – which, across almost the entire second half of Stereolab's career, have rarely resulted in a convincing outcome.

It would be too easy, and unfair, to draw comparisons with any work from the band's golden period. All things considered, it's right to leave it at that, with this modest and rather wistful coda for anyone who, over the years, was struck by their nursery rhymes for grown-ups and their rediscovery of vintage keyboards, well before anyone coined definitions good only for generating hype. As when a great athlete retires, it's right to stand up and applaud gratefully, even if the final performance didn't match their very best.

The decision to end the band's activity was officially confirmed that same year, 2010. The work of its core members, however, didn't stop there, starting with Laetitia Sadier, who had already released a none-too-exciting solo album (The Trip) in 2010, and who would return in 2012 with the more convincing Silencio and then, two years later, with Something Shines (featuring "Release From The Centre Of Your Heart", an "exotica"-flavoured collaboration with the excellent Giorgio Tuma).

Tim Gane, meanwhile, would continue his journey alongside the band's longtime drummer Joe Dilworth and a new electronic keyboardist (Holger Zapf) in the ambitious project Cavern Of Anti-Matter, which debuted in 2014 with the uneven Blood Drums and then, two years later, made amends in style with the excellent Void Beats/ Invocation Trex, offering a wide-ranging krautronica revisitation, all pulsing keyboards, melodic flourishes and psychedelic intrusions that send the music off course.

Contributions by Nicola Minucci ("Fab Four Suture"), Raffaello Russo ("Chemical Chords" and "Not Music"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("Electrically Possessed, Switched On Volume 4", "Instant Holograms On Metal Fim"), Cristiano Orlando ("Pulse Of The Early Brain, Switched On Volume 5")

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